Hiring a virtual assistant to work full time for your small or medium-sized business, can be a great way to reduce the burden of administrative tasks and generate more time to focus on business development and growth. It’s also an inexpensive way to do so, when compared with hiring admin staff to work in-house.

However, working with a VA isn’t simply a case of making the hire, delivering a quick briefing and task-list and letting go of the wheel. If you want to start receiving noticeable benefits from the get-go, there are a couple of golden rules that you owe it to yourself, your business and your new VA, to adhere to.

Provide a Precise and Detailed Task-List

Of course, a task-list is something you must provide when hiring a virtual assistant. Here you can save a lot of misunderstanding by being very specific about the tasks you want your VA to perform. Each task on the list should have detailed, step-by-step instructions. If your chosen VA is in a different country to yours and lives within a different culture, this level of detail is especially important.

Build Daily Review Time into the Early Weeks

For the first few weeks, you should schedule perhaps 30 minutes per day to go over the tasks that your VA has completed and provide him/her with some actionable feedback. This is the best way to catch errors early on, before they become habitual, and also to fine tune your VA’s skillset to the best effect for your business.

Isn’t that a lot of work?…

Yes, I can almost hear you exclaiming. Surely the whole idea of hiring a virtual assistant is to reduce personal workload, not increase it.

Only in the early days…

It’s true, you will need to put some time and effort in to create a detailed task-list and step-by-step procedures for your VA to follow. You will also need to take that extra time to review her work. However, this is only at the beginning.

The time you take now to apply these two golden rules will enable much greater time savings going forward, when you have a confident and competent virtual assistant completing your administrative tasks without error: leaving you free to focus on business improvement and growth.